Early American Literature
Transcendental Literature
Outcomes of the lesson

 Timeline overview of American Literary Movements
 Early American Literature overview and timeline
 Emphasis on Transcendental Era, beginning with the
philosophic and historic context.
 Writing style, major themes, methods of
interpretation and author’s intent of Transcendent
works
 Notable writers of the Transcendent era and their
works
Prior Knowledge Inquiry

 Transcend (Latin: trans, beyond; send,
to climb) means to rise above or go
beyond the limitations of. With this
meaning in mind, what themes do
you think will be pronounced in
Transcendental literary era? Why do
you think the readers and writers of
Transcendental literature were
responding to or reacting against?
Point of View Inquiry

Space and time are the
framework within which the
mind is constrained to
construct its experience of
reality. ~Immanuel Kant
 German philosopher, Immanuel Kant is one of the great originators
of transcendental thought in the western world. Knowing that Kant’s
thought on cognition and intuition influenced the questions, themes
and ideas of Transcendental writings what tropes do you think might
have made Transcendental literature distinct from the previous eras
(Puritan, Age of Reason and Romantic)?
 Furthermore, how do you think the Transcendentalist’s may have
conceived of God, creation or which religious beliefs might they have
held?
Literary Movements

Modernism
Romanticism
Age of
Reason
Puritan Era
Realism
Contemporary
and PostModernism
Transcendentalism
1600 - 1750 1750 - 1800 1800 - 1840 1840 - 1855 1865 1915
1916 - 1946
1946 Present
Early American Literature

Transcendentalism
Puritan Era
1600-1750
Age of Reason/
Enlightenment
1750-1800
Romanticism
1800-1840
1840-1855
Transcendental Literature
circa 1830-1850


American Romantic Literature Era 1800-1860
1840
1800
1860
American Renaissance
Subgenres:
Dark Romantics
Transcendentalists
Transcendental Timeline
William Henry
Channing
(1810-1884) My
Symphony

Bronson Alcott
(1799-1888)
Conversation with
Children on the
Gospels
Ralph Waldo
Emerson
(1803-1888)
Nature
George Ripley (18021880) Founded
Transcendental club in
1836
1830-1840
1840-1850
1850-1860
Margaret
Fuller (18101850) Women in
the Nineteenth
Century
Henry David Thoreau
(1817-1862) Walden
Theodore Parker (1810-1860) Discourse on
the Permanent and Transient in Christianity
1860-1870
1870-1880
1880-1890
1890-1900
American Renaissance
http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/americanrenaissance-uniquely-american-art-literature-and-culture.html#
Transcendent Literature overview

http://education-portal.com/academy/topic/transcendentalism-inliterature.html
Transcendental Literature
 Transcendental Literature was a uniquely American expression. They
believed that knowledge could be arrived at not just through the senses
and reason (experience), but through intuition and contemplation of the
internal spirit. This spiritual mediation was manifest through their
writings, as well as their social and political activities. Furthermore,
Transcendentalists believed in the inherent goodness of people and
creation.
 Derived as a protest against culture and society, many Transcendentalists
writers came out of Harvard Divinity School and the Unitarian
Universalist Church; they would become critics of both Harvard
intellectualism as well as all institutional religions.

Primary Transcendent Influences
 Transcendental Literature was a uniquely American literary
movement that had ideological roots in Europe and America.

German Idealism – Immanuel Kant
English Romantics
American Social Movements
Transcendental
Literature
Transcendental Ingredients

German Idealism – Philosophy of Immanuel Kant
 Adherents to Transcendentalism believed that knowledge could be arrive
at not just through the senses, but through intuition and contemplation
(German Idealism). Moreover, one’s perception of events and meanmaking activity was always unique to oneself.
English Romantic Literature
 A predilection to turn to natural world for intimations of truth was a
recurrent theme in Romantic literature. Nature can free the mind,
imagination and intuition from the impositions of society.
American Social Movements
 Expansionism, slavery, women’s rights, education. Transcendent
literature was socially active by nature, advocating for women’s suffrage,
abolition, conservation of the environment, as well as other social policies
regarding the treatment of prisoners, ethical aspects of expansionism,
government criticism, education, and moral and ethical lifestyle choices.
Immanuel Kant
and the German Frankfurt School of Thought

Everything humans experience is
filtered through sensory perception
and the mind. Therefore, each
person’s sense of reality and truth is
distinct into only themselves. In this
sense, Kant claims, “perception is
reality.”
German Idealism and Immanuel Kant
Kant developed theories on the nature of human knowledge
titled, The Critique of Reason, which he called ‘transcendental
idealism’ or ‘critical idealism.’ Kant proposed that the mind
has “categories of understanding” which are constructed
through one’s personal experience, and are then codified or
compartmentalized in the mind, for one to make sense and
meaning of their experience in the world.

Intuition

This being the empirical nature of physical life,
Kant then posits that humans do not receive all
knowledge from sensory experience alone, nor
from reasoning through it. In addition to these
cognitive faculties, human being possess,
intuition.
 Intuition (Latin): a direct perception of truth,
fact, etc., independent of any reasoning
process; immediate apprehension; in
philosophy, pure, untaught, non-inferential
knowledge. True knowledge inferred through
immediate perception.
How does one critique reason?
 In his magnum opus, The Critique of Reason, Kant wrote, “We
can have cognition of no object as a thing in itself, but only
insofar as it is an object of sensible intuition, i.e. as an
appearance… We assume the distinction between things as
objects of appearance and the very same things as things in
themselves, which our critique had made necessary.”

In other words:
English Romantic Writers
• William Blake, The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell

 Biblical prophecy as romantic and
revolutionary
• William Wordsworth,
Lyrical Ballads
 This work marked the beginning of
the English Romantic period. Poems
were to be “considered as
experiments.”
William
Blake
(17571827)
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Themes of English Romanticism Influencing Transcendentalism
 Individual over society, or individualism
over hierarchical orders
 Tone is melancholic, restrained yet deep
and full
 Reaction against the Age of Reason
writing, yet gradual commitment to social
causes
 Power of Nature to create strong
impressions in the mind and imagination
 Tone is observant, meditative, and aware
of the connection between living things
and objects (subject/object))
 Past, present and future merge together in
the human consciousness (space/time)
 Writer and landscape are in complete
harmony or communion with each other

American Social Movements

 Temperance
 Education and literacy
 Prisons and asylums
 Abolition
 Feminism and women’s suffrage
 Native American treatment
Reform Movements of the 19th Century
http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/the-transcendentalismmovement-and-social-reform.html#
The Transcendental Experience

 Transcendentalism was more than a literary genre; it was a
philosophical and spiritual movement with social implications. It
was a way of seeing and being in the world, that produced various
works of art (writings and paintings) to fortify, symbolize and
stylize itself. The literary works of the Transcendentalists, like
those of the Puritans and the Age of Reason, were given birth
through an emerging belief system – a ideology – carried by a
unique group of individuals who shared similar backgrounds,
ways of seeing and interpreting. The term “Transcendent” would
come to mean more than “beyond experience” to denote “through
experience.”
Transcendentalism as a spiritual, cognitive and social movement
 The Transcendentalists were individualist- centered New Englanders who had grown critical with the
imported Calvinism of the Puritans, and broke with this established authoritarian status quo. They
then became the founding participants and elders within the Unitarian Universalist Church.

 The then, modern Unitarian Universalists attempted to conjoin the empirical thinking of John Locke
with the Christian faith in the unknown or the apophatic. Therefore, they still gave the Bible authority
as a revelational text of divine inspiration, and they believed in miracles.
 Due to this belief, a group of disaffected Unitarian clergy then broke off from the church to develop
Transcendentalism. They had discomfort with a blind faith, or a trust in the unknown. They read the
Bible as product of human history and culture. They emphasized the power and authority of the
mind to make-meaning.
 In Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “why should we not a have a poetry and philosophy of
insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs.” Here,
Emerson asserts that people should not concede to authoritative institution or book to understand
their personal experience or intuitive insight. For Emerson and the Transcendentalists, one’s
experience, along with their intuitive insight was enough to construct knowledge.
 One’s experiential knowledge was also informed by intuition (Kant). Therefore, if the mind and
imagination (internal) are informed by the physical (external) world, so also the mind and
imagination (internal) shapes one’s perceptions of the corporal (external) world. Therefore, the
mind’s intuition or a prior knowledge remains the primary power for constructing meaning through
experience in time and space. Furthermore, the mind is powerful, yet it is also fallible.
 The Transcendental Club first met in 1836 in Cambridge, Massachusetts
as a conversational club for disaffected Unitarian Clergy. It was
founded by George Ripley, a Unitarian minister and a graduate of
Harvard Divinity School. The Transcendentalists had grown to distrust
all hierarchical institutions; and, this was true of established churches as
well as Harvard University. Ripley left the Unitarian church to found
the Transcendental community, Brook Farm.

 The Transcendentalists met over 30 times in a four-year period.
 They sponsored a journal titled, The Dial, where their ideological
writings were published.
 They experimented with several utopian communities including: Brook
Farm, Fruitlands and Walden.
 After developing their ideology in their communities, they began to
interweave their observance of the social order into their social activity –
praxis. They were then motivated to become write and act on behalf of
abolition, women’s rights, education and literacy, environmental
conservation, Native American treatment, the war with Mexico, and
they exercised criticism toward the government.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Born in 1803 in Boston, Massachusetts to an Unitarian
minister, Emerson was raised solely by his mother
after the age of eight, because his father died of
stomach cancer. As a child, Emerson was given a
classical education, he attended Harvard College, and
then Harvard Divinity School. He worked as a school
teacher, lecturer, Unitarian pastor and he received a
generous inheritance upon the death of his first wife.
Regarded as leading figure of Transcendentalism,
Emerson championed individualism, and critiqued
authoritarian institutions. He penned his first
ground-breaking essay articulating Transcendental
philosophy in 1836 – Nature. This poetic piece related
his understanding and fulfillment of experience
through an intercourse within nature. He wrote, “I
become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all;
the currents of the Universe Being circulate through
me; I am part of parcel of God.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson
 His other seminal essays followed including:
Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet
and Experience. He predominantly
emphasized themes concerning individualism,
freedom, human-potential, self-actualization
and the “infinitude of the private man.” His
aunt explained his work, Self-Reliance, as a
“strange medley of atheism and false
independence.” As a founder of the
Transcendental Club, Emerson did not live in
a Transcendental community, however he did
support several of his Transcendental friends
who were impoverished by the experimental
life-style, including Bronson Alcott and Henry
David Thoreau.

 Analysis of Emerson’s Self-Reliance:
 http://educationportal.com/academy/lesson/ralph-waldoemersons-transcendental-poetry-selfreliance.html
Henry David Thoreau

Born into a modest New England family of pencil
manufacturers in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts,
Thoreau is distinguished as a leader in the
Transcendental movement. He attended Harvard
College, and then elected to become a school teacher
when the more conventional jobs of law and business
did not interest him. He returned home from Harvard
and took a school teaching position in his home town at
Concord Public School, however he resigned a few
weeks later because he refused to enact corporal
punishment. He then opened a progressive grammar
school, called Concord Academy, with his brother John.
However when his brother died in 1842 in his arms, he
closed the school. During this time, he met Ralph
Waldo Emerson, with whom he developed a friendship.
Emerson would bring Thoreau into his influential circle
of writers and thinkers, and he encouraged him to
contribute to The Dial.
Henry David Thoreau

 Thoreau was a writer, poet, philosopher, naturalist and minimalist by
nature, and he would grow into becoming a tax resister and social activist
for abolition and environmental conservation (despite accidentally starting
a fire in Walden woods that devoured 300 acres!).
 In 1845 he embarked on a two-year, two-month and two-day simple living
experiment; he moved into a small, self-made cabin on the shores of Walden
pond, on Emerson’s property, 1.5 miles from Emerson’s family home.
 In 1846 Thoreau would run into a tax collector who demanded he pay six
years of delinquent taxes, and Thoreau refused due to his opposition to the
Mexican-American war and slavery. He was thrown in the local jail for the
night, and released the next day because a family member or friend paid his
taxes, against his wishes.
Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience
 This night in jail for tax evasion inspired Thoreau to write his first determining
work, Civil Disobedience which was published in 1849. He argues that
individuals should not allow governments to overrule their consciences,
furthermore it is one’s personal duty to disallow the government from making
one a tool of injustice. Thoreau believed that citizens should stop paying taxes
when their government acted unjustly, and court prison, as a measure of one’s
ethics, if necessary. In Civil Disobedience he wrote,

 “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is
also prison… where the State places those who are not with her, but against her, -the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor… Cast your
whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence… If a thousand
men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody
measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and
shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any
such is possible.
Analysis of Civil Disobedience:
http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/henry-david-thoreauscivil-disobedience-summary-and-analysis.html
Thoreau’s Walden
 Walden is Thoreau’s autobiographical account of his two years,
two months and two days of living simply on Walden pond.
For brevity, he condensed his experience into one year for the
publication of Walden in 1854. He used the seasons of the year
as a symbol of human development, and the writing combines
allegory and metaphor alongside scientific observations.
Furthermore, Thoreau’s knowledge is explained as his
perception rather than logic, as he explores the doubleconsciousness, of what human say and what they actually do.
Thoreau was seeking the integrity that comes from the
interwoven consistency of the two. Thoreau’s words are often
figurative, despite being grounded in the land, because he is
seeking knowledge through his experience. The major themes
presented in the text are: self-reliance, simplicity, the falsity of
progress, nature, perception, critical awareness


Walden
Thoreau’s Walden
In Walden Thoreau wrote,
I went to the woods because I wished to live
deliberately, to front only the essential fact of life, and
see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not,
when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I
did not wish to live what was not life, living is so
dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it
was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck
out all the marrow of life, to live to sturdily and
Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to
cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a
corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and if it
proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and
genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to
the world; of if it were sublime, to know it by
experience, and be able to give a true account of it in
my next excursions. ~Henry David Thoreau

Analysis of Walden:
http://educationportal.com/academy/lesson/henry-davidthoreaus-walden-summary-and-analysis.html
Margaret Fuller
 While Emerson and Thoreau gave lectures in
favor of social change, Margaret Fuller was the
only Transcendentalists who actively pursued
social change through policy. Born in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1810 she was
given solid early education, and was
discouraged that she was unable to attend
Harvard. She did secure a job as a school
teacher, however her lack of access to a higher
education, would motivate her to take on
educational and employment reforms for
women. She was astutely committed in
advancing the causes of abolition, women’s
rights, and overall social equality. She was
considered to be the most well read citizen of
New England, and was the only female
granted admission to Harvard’s library.

Margaret Fuller, The Dial and Women In the
Nineteenth Century
Emerson recruited Fuller to be the first editor of
the Transcendental journal, The Dial, and she
held this position from 1840-1842, and Emerson
took on the duties from 1842-1844. This journal
published the work of the Transcendentalists,
and Fuller’s first masterpiece, The Great Lawsuit;
Man Versus Men. Woman verses Women, was
published therein in 1843. This work would be
published again in 1845 under the name,
Women in the Nineteenth Century. It is a
feminist piece with a satirical twist. Fuller
shows off her familiarity with classical works
and style, by arguing that Men will rightfully
inherit the earth when they become truly
elevated by understanding Divine Love, rather
than the abiding in the current condition of
humanity where there is oppression, abuse and
inequality. She advocates for women’s
education, intellectual, religious, economic and
political freedom, and well as for women’s
employment. This work it is widely considered
to be the first feminist work from the Americas.

Emerson’s Critique of the Transcendentalists

 In the 1840s Emerson begins to critique the isolated
Transcendentalists for “not (being) good members of society”
because they “were not working for “the abolition of the slavetrade” in their untouchable utopian communities. They lived,
according to Emerson, “a life without love, and an activity
without an aim.” This motivated the Transcendentalists to
apply their energies in to social reforms.
Summary:
Principles of Transcendentalism

 Knowledge is gained through
sensory experience, reasoning
and intuition
 The Over-Soul/pantheism
 Reverence for the natural
world
 Simplicity over Materialism
 Self-Reliance
 Civil Disobedience
Evaluation Inquiry:
To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement
rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to listen to
stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act
frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual,
unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common—this is my symphony.
~William Henry Channing

This quote from Channing’s poem, My Symphony is a classic of Transcendental
literature, capturing the major themes of this literary era. Judging from this
quote, infer the major themes pronounced within Transcendental writings.
Then, explain how the Transcendental movement changed from its conception
to its end. Evaluate why this change occurred due to the historic context of the
movement.